The Ilahita Arapesh: Dimensions of Unity

By Donald F. Tuzin

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520332836

Donald F. Tuzin

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The Ilahita Arapesh

The Ilahita Arapesh

DIMENSIONS OF UNITY

Donald F. Tuzin

with a Foreword by MARGARET MEAD

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY, LOS ANGELES, LONDON

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright© 1976, by

The Regents of the University of California

ISBN 0-520-02860-0

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-16720 Printed in the United States of America

In memory of my mother

And what, I said, will be the best limit for our rulers to fix when they are considering the size of the State and the amount of territory which they are to include, and beyond which they will not go?

What limit would you propose?

I would allow the State to increase so far as is consistent with unity; that, I think, is the proper limit.

Very good, he said.

PLATO The Republic

Contents 1

Contents 1

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I Contexts

CHAPTER 1 Elements of Habitation

CHAPTER 2 The Colonial Era: A Local View

CHAPTER 3 Reluctant Warriors

CHAPTER 4 The Rise of Village Structures

PART II Problems

CHAPTER 5 Affinity and Proximity

CHAPTER 6 Kinship, Descent and Residence

CHAPTER 7 Patterns of Disintegr ation

PART III Mechanisms

CHAPTER 8 The Dual Structures

CHAPTER 9 Dualism and Societal Integration

CHAPTER IO Dualism, Power and Authority

PART IV Perspectives

CHAPTER 11 The Local Perspective

Epilogue: Epistemo logy, Lévi-Strauss and Dual Organization

APPENDIX A Glossary of Technical and Vernacular Terms

APPENDIX B Ilahita Kinship Terminology

APPENDIX C Ilahita Clans and Totems

APPENDIX D Meingafo Flutes

APPENDIX E Nggwals, Managing Sub-Moieties and Manpower

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

One of the great pleasures of a long life is to be able to enjoy the work of those who come after one, more fully equipped with better instruments and conceptual tools, carrying the weight of past research firmly but lightly on their shoulders. In the fall of 1968 Donald Tuzin came to discuss his proposed work among the Ilahita Arapesh—at that time we only knew of their location as a special group of what I then called Plains Arapesh—so that I had an opportunity to follow his plans from the start. After some written interchanges and reading his preliminary paper,1 I had an opportunity to visit the field site where he had been working for 20 months. This visit was one of the most exciting events of my field work experience.

I already knew that like the Plains Arapesh, the Ilahita Arapesh allegedly spoke an Arapesh language, and had the complex social structure, the long yam cult and the huge triangular ceremonial houses characteristic of the Abelam. The crucial question for me was whether they could prove to be Arapesh in the subtleties of their ethos, or so acculturated to Abelam style, that I would find them Arapesh in language only. To answer this question, it was necessary to visit Ilahita, taking with me my long months of experience in the Mountain Arapesh village of Alitoa, 39 years before. I also could take with me experience of the latmul culture of the Middle Sepik which had many features in common with the Abelam. From the moment I entered the village, had a chance to see the way the people of Ilahita moved, related to each other, and how their tiny incredibly numerous small plazas were constructed, I felt that they were indeed the same people as the Mountain Arapesh whom I had known so well.

I was privileged to spend three days with the Tuzins in Ilahita, observing, talking incessantly in the kind of intense theoretical communication which can only occur in the field, between two field workers interested in the same problems, and in this case, sharing a knowledge of the same culture. Since that time, I have been able to read Donald Tuzin’s dissertation, and now welcome this first volume of his Ilahita Arapesh study.

In this volume, with its careful tables and diagrams, few selected photographs, and a simple under-statement about his linguistic ability—I heard his rapid-fire interchange in a dialect which was strange to my ears—he takes for granted much that seems to me to mark a stupendous difference between the ethnologist of 40 years ago and the ethnologist of today. He had a background of published field work in the area to which he was going and in which ethnographic detail had been integrated into theory. He had linguistic texts available and informants who spoke excellent pidgin. He was able, thanks to modern transportation, to divide his time in the field into three field periods, so that he could organize his results in Canberra in close communication with colleagues, and with a computer available to turn his multitudinous observations into a usable data bank.

In contrast, my stay among the Mountain Arapesh in 1932 was limited by the amount of food that had been initially carried in, for there was no hope of bringing more. There were no computers, no tape recorders, no usable moving picture cameras. The photographs we took had to be developed within 48 hours. Tuzin has 80 hours of tape recordings of those aspects of the culture with a predominantly aural component—myths, linguistic samples, music, and the sound ambience of ceremonies, quarrels, etc. He has 1,200 color slides: I have hand-colored slides transformed into kodachrome—attractive, but hardly evidence—and for the records of Arapesh painting I had to make my own water color sketches.

My personal knowledge of the terrain was highly distorted as I was carried in, laced in a hammock to a pigcarrying pole, while Reo Fortune made several trips on foot with a handful of carriers. My first view of a Plains Arapesh village was while flying over Maprik in 1971. Donald Tuzin had aerial photographs provided by the Australian government and a chartered airplane to provide a low-altitude reconnaissance of the village. For a crucial period in his field work he had the use of a motor bike in a terrain where this form of transportation is ideal. (This must have provided some of the same kind of intoxicating mastery of an intractable space problem that I also found when I visited the transplanted Mountain Arapesh community at Hoskins Bay in 1973, where the settlers lived in numbered sections laid out on a grid. I had only to indicate the number of the house I wanted to visit, and Dr. Anton Ploeg could take me there by car.)

In the formal presentation of his highly complex analysis, we get only a slight glimpse of the easy and felicitous way in which he and his wife, Beverly, related to people, and of his intense preoccupation with individuals as individuals. His theoretical approaches were generated by his data during the intervals between field trips, and so were not the ex post facto type of analysis in which the field worker arrives at his hypotheses only after he has left the field, when they are no longer subject to checking.

Except for an explicit discussion of a difference of view with Lévi-Strauss, his sophisticated use of modern psychological theories is left implicit. Necessarily because of the detail with which he has developed his theme, this volume can only hint at the richness of the artistic and supernatural interests of the Ilahita Arapesh. But I should like the reader to have these in mind, and see this first volume as just one part of a very large, rich canvas, which will be filled out in publications to come.

Ilahita has one parallel among the loosely organized and diffuse settlements of the East Sepik District in another huge isolated village, dominating its neighbors, where many comparable processes are at work—the latmul village of Tambanum, where Gregory Bateson and I worked in 1938 and where Rhoda Metraux worked in 1967, 1969, and 1971.2 The details of Tambanum social structure—which differs in many ways from that of the Middle Sepik villages described by Gregory Bateson in Noven (especially Mindim- bit, Kanganaman and Parambei)—will add new cogency to Tuzin’s discussion of the way in which structure emerges from a historical situation and is made intelligible in terms of the known personalities of identified individuals.

Although I share Tuzin’s feeling about the difficulties of submitting Lévi-Strauss’s formulations to the test of field work which goes into detail about the behavior of known individuals, I do not see as glaring a contradiction as he finds. Among another Sepik people,3 the Mundugumor (now called the Biwat of the Biwat River, formerly called the Yuat River), I did find a case where the people had unworkable structures which—in the abstract—fitted Lévi-Strauss’s theories perfectly.4 But in practice, there was not a single person who lived in terms of the fantastically over-elaborated model; this suggests that an inherent capacity to think in such dichotomies is a property of the human mind which manifests itself and is receptive to analysis at a non- behavioral level.

I suggest that those students and readers who have

found great stimulation in Lévi-Strauss’s work—a not inconsiderable number of our colleagues at present—would get a great deal more out of this magnificent piece of Arapesh reality if they read Part IV, Chapter 12, Epistemology, Lévi- Strauss and Dual Organization, first. Those eager ethnographers who are more interested in the dynamics of social organization in a living culture can appropriately plunge in at the start, and leave such epistemological matters to the end, as the author has done. I might even gently suggest that Tuzin’s conclusion on a note of sharp opposition to Levi- Strauss’s position might be related to the particular manifestations of the human mind to which Lévi-Strauss addresses himself!

As an anthropologist suckled on Lowie’s Primitive Society, who has come late in life to enjoy Lévi-Strauss also, I can only rejoice that there are these and many other approaches to material like this, knowing full well that the record will now be here by which to test future theories, long after the Ilahita Arapesh have finally come to closer terms with the impinging modern world. Work like this stands and is ours for the future as well as for the present state of our understanding of human beings and the cultures they build.

The American Museum Margaret Mead

of Natural History

New York, N. Y.

June 2, 1975

1 Donald Tuzin, Dualism among the Muhiang Araphesh (paper delivered before the Department of Anthropology, Australian National University, February 1971).

2 Margaret Mead, A Re-examination of Major Themes of the Sepik Area, Papua New Guinea, in press.

3 Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York: Morrow, 1935).

4 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Réflexions sur l’atome de parenté, L’Homme, 13, no. 3 (July-September 1973), 5 — 30.

Acknowledgments

It is a long-awaited pleasure to identify with deep appreciation those agencies and individuals that have contributed, materially and intellectually, to this study. Research was conducted in 1969-72 under support of a scholarship in the Department of Anthropology of the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. I am obliged to that institution for its generous funding, to the Wenner- Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for a supplemental grant-in-aid, and to the University of California at San Diego for financial assistance during the final stages of writing and production.

In what was then the Territory of Papua New Guinea, officers of the Department of District Administration were most helpful in providing occasional transport, supplies, general information and access to patrol reports and court records. Assistant District Commissioner Mike Neal must be acknowledged in this regard, and in particular I wish to thank Bob and Carol Lachal for their abiding support and hospitality. Field staff of the South Sea Evangelical Mission were equally helpful. I am indebted to Keith and Mabs Duncan, Helga Weber, Ursula Geffke and especially Liesbeth Schrader—a great-hearted lady of long-standing residence in Ilahita, who welcomed me to the village and introduced me to its people and culture. Of the villagers themselves, I cannot sufficiently describe their unwavering kindness and tolerance toward me. In the limited space I can mention only a few of my attentive hosts: Councillor Kunai, Gidion, Supalo, Saowen, Moses, Kwamwi, Ongota, Behinguf and Ribeka.

I have also been fortunate in receiving guidance from a number of distinguished scholars. During early studies at the University of London, my interest in Sepik cultures was nurtured by Phyllis Kaberry, while Anthony Forge suggested—with considerable prescience—that Ilahita would be an interesting field location. Reo Fortune (University of Cambridge) subsequently oriented me to the Arapesh language. For their fruitful criticisms of this and earlier drafts, I am grateful to Paul Alexander, Kenelm Burridge, Ann Chowning, David K. Jordan, Roger M. Keesing and Peter Lawrence. In writing a foreword to this volume, Margaret Mead is continuing the gracious interest she has displayed toward the project from its start. In exchanges over the period, and during a visit to Ilahita itself, she has offered valuable insights which have found their way into these pages. My greatest intellectual debt, however, is owed to Derek Freeman. As my doctoral supervisor, his scrupulous concern addressed all aspects of the research. Accordingly, many of the thoughts contained herein were developed under influence of his friendship, advice and gentle criticism.

I have rested assured with June Wilkins’s typing of the final manuscript. And, to my wife Beverly is owed the special merit of having borne lovingly the trials of life when a book is in the making.

Introduction

The Problem

This is the first of two books comprising a study of social and religious organization among the Ilahita Arapesh, a horticultural, village-based culture occupying the hilly hinterland of the Torricelli Mountains of northeastern New Guinea. In particular, it is a study of Ilahita itself—the locally prominent village after which the wider cultural and dialect group is named.

Ilahita commanded attention from the project’s inception because, having a population closely approaching 1,500 persons, it is one of the largest traditional villages known in New Guinea. There are, it is true, settlements of comparable size in Austronesian parts of Papua and island Melanesia, but these typically exemplify the greater integrative capacities of a social structure centered on chieftainship. Ilahita, on the contrary, has no such centralized authority; hence, the village’s very existence poses an analytical problem whose simple phraseology belies its inherent complexities. In brief, how did Ilahita become this large? More significantly, it having reached this size, by what means has village unity been maintained?

The study addresses the integrative mechanisms of Ilahita village. Ordinarily, such arrant parochiality would suggest little of interest to the general reader, but here the singularity of the place lifts it out of its home province and sets it on a plane of broader relevance. If world culture is the anthropological laboratory, comparison its experimental method, then the crucial instances are surely those which are empirically the least probable. For, just as in physical science, these tend to have the greatest information content. Let us say, then, that previous experience fails to prepare us for a village of this size in a region devoid of centralizing political structures and typified by segmentation processes. And yet, here it is. There is a wide array of cultural features shared by this population and its neighbors, but in the matter of settlement size and other particulars the community is something of an anomaly—one which, by virtue of controlling cultural features, can be approached analytically through various levels of comparison. The improbable affords the opportunity of observing dynamics which are perhaps less obtrusive, but inherent none the less, in empirical instances that accord better with what we would expect. The unexpected, in short, compels us to ask—how come? And once this question is asked, the theoretical possibilities become open-ended.

Not surprisingly, therefore, it is not my intention to offer a comprehensive ethnography of Ilahita Arapesh culture. Large areas of subsistence patterning and economic and political life are untouched, and, in the present volume at least, magico-religious institutions are treated more by allusion than by direct address. Except for the opening chapters, and certain later sections requiring cultural background, attention is generally focused on the central issue of inquiry, namely, increasing social complexity in a New Guinea community. For the most part, theoretical discussions occur passim, alongside the relevant data, but at this time it might be helpful to foreshadow the broad outline of the argument by introducing its four main parts: I, Contexts; II, Problems; III, Mechanisms; and IV, Perspectives.

The problem posed for Ilahita implies two historical modes. In a particularist sense, we wish to know what circumstances promoted this increase. Population movements, patterns of warfare and dislocation, differential resource availability—these are the straightforward background features, closely delimited by time and space, which will be reviewed in the chapters of Part I.

Fortunately, the requisite historical depth is yet shallow enough that oral records can be inferentially supplemented at points without straining feasibility or contradicting evidence from independent sources. The important thing, which does not depend on specific historical accuracy, is that the period preceding European contact was not a timeless, ethnographically present idyl wherein the natives were happy just being themselves; rather, corresponding with the intrusion of fierce, predatory outsiders into the area, it was an era of unprecedented militarism. But as many examples in world history have shown, periods of turmoil often breed social works of great adaptive ingenuity. For the Arapesh also, the new exigencies of power and security which now obtruded demanded new adaptive strategies—among them, the growth and consolidation of villages—and those groups which most quickly revised former social predispositions were at a distinct advantage over others which did not. By the same token, however, the modern period has seen another redefinition in the desiderata of prestige excellence; and once again the premium is upon adaptive flexibility— with the result that in some cases, including Ilahita’s, there is a dreary irony in the last becoming first, and the first, last.

The adaptational emphasis correctly implies the other historical mode, that of process. Caution is advised over this concept, however, because there are two or more distinct processes occurring conjunctively. Social process, for example, typically refers to the inherent dynamic of a society, the structurally predicated slippages and sub-cyclings by which a society advances itself toward the receding mirage of homeostatic perfection. Social homeostasis is a relatively harmless ideal-type when used heuristically—frequently it is the only way to discern a dynamic aspect in a society whose history seems every bit as static as its informants say it is—for it models reasonably well the ever-changing changelessness of societies everywhere.

What happens, though, when social process proceeds through an ambience which is itself changing significantly? In this instance we have, so to speak, a wider historical process imposing itself on, and forcing adjustment in, a narrower social process. In the Arapesh case, external adversaries precipitated a primary shift from dispersed, hamlet-sized settlements into large, defensible villages, the most striking example being Ilahita itself. This may have solved the problem of security, but it also created the necessity of having to preserve solidarity on an entirely new and expanded scale. When a relatively homeostatic system is traumatized from without, problems may emerge from within which were latent or merely potential in the previous state.

Accordingly, Ilahita social process had to adjust to the fact that people were now in a dense living situation, compelled by circumstances to remain there. No longer could a troublesome kinsman or neighbor be left behind in a casually remedial change of residence; neither could local feuds develop without prejudice to third parties. Now, the various problems chronically infecting relations of proximity, kinship and political rivalry were locked into a residential situation that was no longer fluid; indeed, as the community enlarged further, the amount of ambient tension increased proportionately. These problems—some of which are conceived as artifacts of the changed situation while others are deeply rooted in the culture—are treated in the chapters of Part II. In the latter section of this discussion it will be seen that the removal of external threat in the modern period has precipitated the dismantling of Ilahita village, as the need to manage these internal problems becomes seen as no longer compelling.

The issue of how Ilahita preserved itself during the pre-European period is the subject of Part III. As the population grew and coalesced, the social problems created or exacerbated by this transformation in turn stimulated the elaboration of regulatory, integrative mechanisms. Replete with cohesive functions, a complex dual organization emerged; an intricate web of moieties, sub-moieties, initiation classes and age-sets evolved as a systemic adjustment to the stresses of demography. By implication the component structures of the dual organization are, in yet another processual mode, continually re-created from the lower levels of kinship, neighborhood and politics from whence they initially developed. Their persistence quite depends on this input and is shaped by it; so that changes in mundane behavioral spheres are, so to speak, monitored at higher structural levels which adjust accordingly. Not only does this model provide for change in the system, via the lower levels; it also predicates the rarefied dual structures on the motivations of individuals operating within a changing sociocultural setting (see below).

Part IV attempts to set the analysis of Ilahita dual organization into the ethnographic context of the Sepik by adducing comparative evidence to demonstrate that this is a regional social form with numerous local permutations. In the last chapter, general epistemological arguments are developed which position this study in relation to the prevailing theory of dualism, namely, that derived from French structuralism and associated with the work of Claude Lévi- Strauss. Specifying the points of divergence between these two approaches, it is revealed that they embody fundamentally distinct philosophical orientations, intellectual stances whose relevance extends far beyond theories of dualism per se to demarcate alternative perspectives on culture, society and the individual.

Methodological Individualism

The analysis of Ilahita dual organization will be guided in large measure by the principle of methodological individualism, a notion requiring some preliminary discussion.1 The principle embodies a conception of society and history which holds that the structure of our social environment arises, as a rule, out of the indirect, the unintended and often the unwanted by-products of decisions and actions taken by anonymous individuals according to the logic of their situation (Popper 1950:286 ff.).² The contrast is with what Popper has called methodological collectivism—a principle which, in its pure form, renders the individual a reifying fiction, a walking bundle of social rules, statuses, values and similar abstractions. Methodological individualism, by assigning the individual as the locus of social change and maintenance, implicitly denies the independent, a priori reality of social facts as such; rather, these are conceived a posteriori to the individuals who, by their actions, compose them. Accordingly, this approach proceeds from a nominalist rather than a realist or essentialist perspective.³

Let me clarify and develop this definition. First, the provision of anonymity assures that the model implies neither a great-man nor a conspiracy theory of history and social development. To be sure, great men and conspirators have been known to turn the tide of history, and no doubt will continue to do so; but the knowledge of past particulars cannot, in itself, be generalized to future or unanalyzed ones. Second, the individual in the model is presumed to be a competent member of a society, steeped in the norms and values peculiar to the group of people among whom he was born and raised. This is an important point, because failure to acknowledge the saliency of social conditioning was the prime defect of nineteenth-century individualists; genuine reductionists, they were forced "to operate with the idea of a beginning of society, and with the idea of a human nature and a human psychology as they existed prior to society" (ibid., p. 285). Note, however, that the obverse is equally unacceptable; norms and values originate in, and are actualized through, the interactions of individuals, and, therefore, cannot logically precede these interactions. Accordingly, the granting of a social context to the individual does not entail a reversion to essentialism (see above).

We now come to the heart of the principle: that social structure arises, as a rule, from the unforeseen consequences of actions taken by individuals according to the logic of their situations. Note that there is no exclusion here of rationality or premeditation. Individuals do set goals and occasionally achieve them. But to speak in such terms of entire societies makes rather less sense. Stories handed down about the law-giving genius of Solon or Lycurgus may have dramatic appeal, but only the intervention of myth permits us to focus the complexities of societal change in those periods onto the visionary deeds of a culture-hero. Thus: Only a minority of social institutions are consciously designed, while the vast majority have just ‘grown’ as the undesigned results of human activities.. (ibid., p. 286). Moreover, even most of the few institutions which were consciously and successfully designed (say, a newly founded university, or a trade union) do not turn out according to plan—again because of the unintended social repercussions resulting from their intentional creation (ibid.). For the most part, that is, our actions are governed by relatively immediate considerations; foresightedness" typically refers to the long-term personal consequences that a contemplated action might have. As sentient beings, the logic we apply to any given situation is a calculus, not only of social prescriptions and values, but also of personal strategies, psychological proclivities and other factors which are, in principle, determinable. The business of social science is to make these determinations and—projecting beyond the personal level— to delineate the societal consequences of such an action as it is (or could become) generalized in the population.4

The strength of the model lies in its empirically isolable unit of observation. As the conceptual link between wider studies of social process and deeper studies of cognition and depth-psychology, the methodological individual is our guide through many of man’s domains. Furthermore, the model celebrates variation—for, indeed, each individual is unique in terms of this behavioral configuration—and this is the key to understanding systemic change. Whatever the practical difficulties of implementing this view—as Gellner rightly notes, "social scientists are not biographers en grande série" (1966:176)—its paradigmatic utility enables us to conceive change as an inherent property of human groups. The variation amounts to a behavioral repertoire which members of a group bring to bear on the equally varied circumstances of daily existence. If change at the level of social structure and values is normally so imperceptible, it is because the input mechanism (individuals applying slightly varying situational logics) is both minutely geared and constantly active.

From these observations, certain analytic procedures are suggested. Having isolated the research problem (in this case Ilahita’s increasing size and structural complexity) and described, as a first approximation, the character of local institutions, the task is to define the various situations which bear importantly on the problem and evaluate the factors operating on individuals in response to these. (It is presumed that most situations would arise from understandings already shared within the group; that is, they would be culturally shared.) This is done in conjunction with tracing the range of variation (between situations and between individual responses), using the qualitative and quantitative techniques available in social anthropology. By deducing the unintended repercussions of this actional field, we arrive at an understanding of "organic-like social behavior where members of some social system (that is, a collection of people whose activities disturb and influence each other) mutually adjust themselves to the situations created by the others in a way which, without direction from above, conduces to the equilibrium or preservation or development of the system" (Watkins 1957:114). In the present study, the system whose equilibrium, preservation and development we are seeking to explain is the social entity of Ilahita village.

The Field Situation

Apart from the fact of its unusual size, the one thing I knew for certain about Ilahita before arriving there was that it had been a station of the South Sea Evangelical Mission since the early 1950s. How this boded for the anthropological enterprise, I could not predict. Accordingly, the first month was spent reconnoitering the feasibility of carrying out the original research plan. During this interval I camped in a ramshackle government resthouse—a reasonably waterproof structure available to official persons on overnight stays. This was situated near the geographical center of the village, a few meters from the church, school, clinic and well- appointed mission residence. My time was occupied taping myth narratives, studying the language, getting to know the villagers and missionaries, and visiting surrounding communities to gain acquaintance with the physical and cultural countryside.

From my vantage point, village life appeared to revolve very largely around the Mission, whose compound was often aswarm with activity. A typical weekday morning found the exuberant young German schoolmaster leading his sevenyear-olds in calesthenics and marching drills to the recorded strains of a brass band, while across the clearing a queue had formed outside the clinic where a missionary nurse and her local assistant dressed wounds, administered medicaments and supplied bottle formulas to under-endowed mothers. From another side, from around the sousaphone, came the refrains of a small congregation gathered for morning worship. Finally, there was the usual contingent of women bringing garden surplus to the Mission to exchange for soap, salt, matches and razor blades.

These bustling scenes had a very distinct charm, a kind of freshly starched wholesomeness; but they were not what had brought me to Ilahita, and I felt inclined to move elsewhere. My forays afield were meanwhile producing little, however. Against the impressive enigma of Ilahita’s size, the surrounding villages had a drab sameness about them, conditioned no doubt by the brevity of my excursions and the eagerness of my Ilahita guides in pointing up defects. And yet, ineluctably, their prejudices were becoming my own. Ilahita was increasingly home to me; relations with villagers and missionaries were developing smoothly, and there seemed no practical obstacle to remaining there. On the contrary, there were telling logistical advantages to being near the Mission, in addition to which the head of the station, Sister Liesbeth Schrader, had lived there for nearly fifteen years and had a stock of local knowledge which she very generously shared.5 At month’s end, with some misgivings, I elected to remain in Ilahita.

Months later, after I had moved into one of the hamlets and was a daily observer of very different morning scenes, it became clear that my initial impression of Mission influence was utterly distorted. Of those marching juveniles only a handful were actually from Ilahita; the rest were boarders whose parents lived elsewhere. Many of the adults seen around the compound (except for those seeking medical aid) were regulars whose lives did indeed revolve around the Mission but who were far from typical in this regard. This was no slur on the ability or dedication of the Christian workers, but rather it exemplified another aspect of Ilahita’s large size. In such a sprawling village—it covered an estimated fourteen square kilometers—there were many parts never visited, or even known to exist, by the Mission staff, and the average villager could easily go about his daily routines for months without being aware of the European presence. Ironically, since much of the active proselytizing was aimed at surrounding villages, these communities received the brunt of influence. By merest good fortune, the decision to stay had proved felicitous.

Early in the second month I moved from the resthouse to Elaf hamlet in the ward of Ililip. The observational situation was excellent: Elaf was the ceremonial precinct of the ward, the place of public events and children’s play, where men drifted each evening in search of quiet conversation over betel nut and tobacco. The ground sloped steeply from the rear of the house, allowing a good view of the next hamlet and the one beyond that. The front looked across a 40-meter clearing at the porticoes and exterior hearths of two nuclear-family dwellings.6 In another sector stood a tiny cooperative trade store, a favorite meeting place for young men and adolescents. During the second year of fieldwork a major spirit house was erected on the same clearing, making Elaf the focal center of the entire village for many months of ritual activity dedicated to the cult of Nggwal.

After the mapping of the entire village, a census was undertaken which covered basic demographic and sociological particulars: approximate age, household structure, clan and ritual affiliation, hamlet of origin, residence and fertility history, genealogical material, educational and plantation experience, and so forth. During this first visit of thirteen months7 other systematic enquiries included: a stratified 20 percent sample of household property, real and personal; a stratified 10 percent sample of Ililip household heads with regard